collaborations
for future
Unexpected Voices
by Nina Pigaht
How to embody climate change?
If you thought you came to listen or to talk about climate change, you are wrong.
One of my earliest memories is from when I was 4 or 5 years old, lying on the beach with my feet towards the water and my head towards the sand. What sticks with me most about this memory is the feeling that accompanies it: that feeling of anticipation. The tension of knowing something is coming, something you have no control over.
This sense of anticipation was the first thought that came to my mind at the session “How to Embody Climate Change,” part 4 of the Unexpected Encounters series about multi-disciplinary collaboration, moderated by Marscha Simon. This session was different. It made you tap into your emotions and explore embodied forms of climate change.
I am something that brings change.
We began with an exercise where participants were asked to close their eyes and connect with the feeling of being climate change. People tapped into their thoughts, images, and feelings of anger, tension, guilt, process, need for balance, and harmony. It was an exercise in positionality as much as it was about feeling: Who am I in relation to climate change? What do I need to express or reject? How does it relate to me and my disciplinary practice? These were questions the speakers of the evening also grappled with: Rafaele Andrade, Reineke van Tol, and Yufei Gao.
New tools
Andrade’s work exemplifies multidisciplinary expression through music. Reflecting on the traditional tools she used as a musician, she decided to innovate by creating a new instrument with more strings and sensor-based technology. During the session, she performed a musical interpretation of dead zones in the ocean. Listening to it, I was introduced to new and unique ways of experiencing sound—sounds that resonate with the complexities of our increasingly complicated world.
Other speakers recognized this need for new tools. Gao shared that coming to the Netherlands made her practice more versatile. With a background in art history in China, she learned to use machines to design new tools. At the symposium, participants could view a part of her larger work: an installation of terracotta pots, each designed with one day’s worth of weather data. The original piece displays over 92 days in terracotta pots (the countdown to her graduation) compared to historical temperatures (pre-climate change). The more the temperatures differed, the more unstable the pots became, eventually falling apart. It was a powerful representation of how climate change affects the materiality of things and a call to engage audiences more deeply in this critical discussion.
Van Tol, from Wageningen University, emphasized the importance of not just knowing about climate change but also feeling it. She highlighted how design—and all forms of artistic engagement—can facilitate this connection. “As a student, I wanted to save the world,” she said, but she realized that we need actionable change and that people need to understand their relationship with the environment. She decided to put this thought into action in her courses and found that experiencing the world and embedding oneself in their studies helps students understand their surroundings better. Social sciences, in particular, allow more room for questioning than the more conservative and disengaged natural sciences.
Listening
In Andrade’s opinion, we all have our different languages, and if we don’t learn each other’s languages, we cannot develop empathy. By asking questions and creating intimate relationships, we foster empathy through what we do. Gao notes that it hasn’t always been easy in interdisciplinary settings, but actively listening is a way to interact with other positions. She considers herself a storyteller, finding ways to represent voices, such as that of the environment. She describes the feeling of disconnect from nature and living in a highly controlled environment.
Maybe that is the relationship we should build with nature—a more intimate one. We need to learn to connect with it on an emotional and physiological level. Art, I would suggest, is a doorway. The process of art, cultural participation, or co-creation with it makes our contact with nature an ongoing conversation.
In her book Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, Olivia Laing says it well: “Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It’s work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers. New spaces. After that, my friend, it’s up to you.”
This quote resonates. But let’s take it further: After that, my friend, we need radical climate policy. [link to Unexpected Encounters #5]